The Man With the Iron Fists, directed by Wu-Tang Clan member RZA, is a slick
but soulless martial arts film, writes Tim Robey.

A man overburdened with consonants, hip-hop maestro RZA now makes his debut as a movie director. He’s appeared in films here and there – you wouldn’t say acted, quite – and done great soundtrack work for Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino, lending a cool mysticism to tales of forlorn assassins and vengeful rampages. That’s the very quality that seems to have deserted him here in this flurry of Kung-pow martial-arts devilry with little on its mind but the next dismemberment. The Man with the Iron Fists comes from the school of said Tarantino – he takes a presenter credit – but has an awful lot to learn.

Where the Kill Bill movies served up their splattery mayhem with bold-type characterisation and enough suspense to get by, this just sits there. You can see gestures, at best, towards panto caricature, ill-fitting though most of them are with the milieu of 19th-century China. Russell Crowe enters proceedings a reel or so in as Jack Knife, a hellraising, pince-nez-equipped British gent who carves up a corpulent brothel customer from groin to gullet, and claims a trio of hot babes as his booty. It’s a terribly smug performance, and the clank of cultural solecism when he rhymes “basil” with “hazel” is symptomatic of the lazy job he’s doing.

Lucy Liu’s whorehouse madam is just as bad – she seems to be doing a feeble drag impersonation of Lucy Liu, replete with unintentionally comic emphases: “Here in Jungle Village the winds of CHANGE… are nearly upon us!”. RZA has these nominal stars on hand but never makes them key agents in his plot, which is a tedious slab of incomprehensible hoopla about feuding warlords. I have no idea why Street Fighter’s Byron Mann, playing a sarcastic clan heir, came as Tina Turner circa 1988, but it’s an inappropriate look.

The movie’s best hope is disreputable midnight-trash enjoyment value, but there’s something soulless to its slickness – CGI blood spurts from every available limb, but no one’s costumes ever get spattered. RZA himself plays the Blacksmith, a freed slave who replaces his severed hands with literal iron fists, but he’s a stony charisma void right at the centre, often behaving as if he called action and forgot which side of the camera he was on.

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The thematic parallels to Tarantino’s forthcoming Django Unchained are strangely blatant, but we’ll be in for a crushing disappointment if that doesn’t up the ante. This one is numb pastiche, so frazzled you can’t find a pulse.